She was arrested and charged for possession and discharge of a weapon on school property too

A teenage girl from Florida has been expelled from her high school for an accidental explosion caused by mixing chemicals together [outside] on school grounds.

Kiera Wilmot, 16, a Bartow High School student in Florida, was expelled from school when her chemistry experiment exploded. She was mixing some household chemicals (toilet cleaner and aluminum foil) in an 8-ounce water bottle when the top popped off unexpectedly and an explosion occurred.

According to Wilmot, she thought this combination would simply create a bit of smoke, and that the explosion was an accident.

However, Wilmot was arrested on Monday and charged with possession and discharge of a weapon on school property and discharging a destructive device.

Kiera Wilmot

She was also expelled from school, and will now have to continue her high school career in an expulsion program.

These extreme consequences are due to zero-tolerance programs, which were enacted in schools in 1994. At that time, Congress required states to adopt laws that expelled students who brought firearms to school for at least a year. All 50 states adopted the laws in order to receive federal funding.

Many are in opposition of these laws, saying that it isn't fair to good kids who make occasional mistakes. Many oppose what happened to Wilmot as well, but the school district has responded to the incident saying that they reacted properly, as the law requires.

"Unfortunately, what she did falls into our code of conduct," Leah Lauderdale, a spokeswoman for the district, tells Riptide. "It's grounds for immediate expulsion.

"We urge our parents to convey to their kids that there are consequences to their actions."

30 years old here and have made quite a few "bombs" from dry ice and other things and have never heard of this combination (will probably try it out soon though). Don't go around assuming that what you know is known by every other person around. Anyway, intentional or not she did not do this on school grounds which means the school has no reason to expel her at all.

One of the few times I will agree with reclaimer77. This is not an experiment, it is stupidity from watching youtube videos. The best thing the article can say is that she's a good student that never got into trouble. So basically, she's a C or B student that has not been expelled, suspended or have any problems with law enforcement yet. Geez, as a teenager, I really hope you haven't gotten into trouble.

Alert Einstein original intention was not to create an atomic bomb to cause destruction. The man is credited for saving humanity more than anything. In fact, you can thank him for nuclear power along with GPS. Most new discoveries in physics are just an extension of his work. Our 2 spacecrafts wouldn't have made it out to interstellar space if it wasn't for Einstein's work. We are still deciphering a lot of his work today and finally proving it's true.

Agreed,The average age of posters defending with the girl is probably somewhere in their 20's.This POS made a bomb. She knew what the result would be and she did it on school grounds. If she did this at my daughter's high school, I would hope she would be treated the same. You cannot endanger your classmates and feign ignorance.DT and DC Tiffany using "science experiment" in the title is partly to blame. Ignorant people read a title, skim the opining of Tiffany, and skip the link to the true story and you wonder why America is in decline.Must of these turds defending this ignorant student get their news from Twitter and social media.Low information voters at their best.

quote: Is everyone here an adolescent with an extreme dislike of teachers and schools? Because the posts here nearly all have that tone, and it's embarrassing. A modicum of common sense and maturity here would go a long way. The fact that Motoman is nearly alone on this is just depressing.

Common sense is to presume evil intent and expel from school? That is truly depressing.

I can't tell if the anger here is driven by sexism or the stupidity stemming from zero tolerance policy. I know that in high school I was highly interested in chemical reactions that had a bang. I loved testing that methanol (which I made in a tube) did actually burn. It's a very short step to doing an experiment that back fires. You don't give a kid a free pass for that sort of error, but expulsion seems to be an odd form of 'curiosity killing the cat.'

Now those of you convinced she was practicing bomb making for bad reasons - why would she do her trial run on campus, then?